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Toni Kan – Nights of the Creaking Bed and Other Stories
These stories haunt, horrify, make you sad, make you smile: you will not remain impassive or unmoved by experiences related with such clarity. You feel Toni Kan must have witnessed them, or lived them, first hand. Corruption, religious intolerance, gratuitous violence, the irresponsible attitudes of some men to their offspring, and the importance of joy are just some of the big themes at work in this startling collection of tales. Lola Shoneyin – The Secret Lives of Baba Sade’s Wives
Baba Sade has never considered the notion that love and good sex are important components of marriage (sex, yes; good sex – what’s that?) All runs reasonably smoothly in the patriarch’s home, until wife number four arrives. And all the family secrets become exposed. Shoneyin’s prowess as a poet shines through on every page. She paints scenes that are so full of energy, and so fantastically alive that readers will be moved to weep with her characters within minutes of shouting, laughing and hurling insults at them. With its subtle, crafty and delightfully wicked plot, filled to the brim with laugh-out loud hilarious moments, The Secret Lives of Baba Sade’s Wives is as breath taking as it is audacious. Doreen Baingana – Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe
As the Mugishas cope with Uganda’s collapsing infrastructure, they also contend with the universal themes of family cohesion, sex and relationships, illness, betrayal and spirituality. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani – I Do Not Come to You By Chance Nwaubani’s tragi-comic debut novel provides a satirical take on contemporary Nigerian life – 419 scams, bigmanism, thwarted dreams and the impossibility of love in a situation where everyone worships at the altar of money and corrosive materialism. |
Nights of the Creaking Bed and Other Stories is full of colourful characters involved in affecting dramas: a girl who can smell scorpions and see in the dark; a middle-aged housewife who finds love again but has an impossible decision to make; a young man who can’t get the image of his naked, beautiful mother out of his mind; a young bus conductor who dares to love across religious lines; a child so poor he has to hawk onions on Christmas day and many others. Some, initially full of hope, find their lives blighted by the cruelty of others, or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or by just not knowing the ‘right’ people.
Lola Shoneyin has taken a story of self-discovery and turned it into a work of sheer, spunky, brilliance. The Secret Lives of Baba Sade’s Wives is infused with drama and such rich imagery that Baba Sade, along with his collection of wives and children, could easily be characters in a Yoruba parody of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or even the Bible!
In this debut, Doreen Baingana follows a Ugandan girl, Christine, and her two older sisters as they navigate the uncertain terrain of adolescence. Set mostly in Entebbe with stops in Kampala and Los Angeles, Tropical Fish depicts the reality of life for Christine Muguisha and her family after Idi Amin’s dictatorship. In one of the stories, Christine’s sister Patti writes about daily life at a typical African boarding school and the impact of class and religion on her relationships with fellow students. The other sister, Rosa, is a free spirit who thinks that she could ‘magically’ seduce one of her teachers.
I Do Not Come to You By Chance is the story of two remarkable characters: Kingsley, a young man eager to change the world, and his mother, Augustina, who watches her once-proud family descend further into poverty after her husband falls ill. They are forced to turn to Augustina’s infamous brother, Cash Daddy, who runs a successful 419 empire. Unconditional family support is the Nigerian way, but the hand Cash Daddy extends in charity has several consequences. As Kingsley and Augustina are drawn into Cash Daddy’s outlandish world, they’ll soon learn that nothing in Nigeria comes for free.